Top quark physics

Abstract

The top quark, when it was finally discovered at Fermilab in 1995 completed the three-generation structure of the Standard Model (SM) and opened up the new field of top quark physics. Viewed as just another SM quark, the top quark appears to be a rather uninteresting species. Produced predominantly, in hadron-hadron collisions, through strong interactions, it decays rapidly without forming hadrons, and almost exclusively through the single mode t {r_arrow} Wb. The relevant CKM coupling V{sub tb} is already determined by the (three-generation) unitarity of the CKM matrix. Rare decays and CP violation are unmeasurable small in the SM. Yet the top quark is distinguished by its large mass, about 35 times larger than the mass of the next heavy quark, and intriguingly close to the scale of electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking. This unique property raises a number of interesting questions. Is the top quark mass generated by the Higgs mechanism as the SM predicts and is its mass related to the top-Higgs-Yukawa coupling? Or does it play an even more fundamental role in the EW symmetry breaking mechanism? If there are new particles lighter than the top quark, does the top quark decay into them? Could non-SM physics first manifest itself in non-standard couplings of the top quark which show up as anomalies in top quark production and decays? Top quark physics tries to answer these questions. Several properties of the top quark have already been examined at the Tevatron. These include studies of the kinematical properties of top production, the measurements of the top mass, of the top production cross-section, the reconstruction of t{bar t}pairs in the fully hadronic final states, the study of {tau} decays of the top quark, the reconstruction of hadronic decays of the W boson from top decays, the search for flavor changing neutral current decays, the measurement of the W helicity in top decays, and bounds on t{bar t} spin correlations. Most of these measurements are limited by the small sample of top quarks collected at the Tevatron up to now. The LHC is, in comparison, a top factory, producing about 8 million t{bar t}pairs per experiment per year at low luminosity (10 fb{sup {minus}1}/year), and another few million (anti-)tops in EW single (anti-)top quark production. They therefore expect that top quark properties can be examined with significant precision at the LHC. Entirely new measurements can be contemplated on the basis of the large available statistics.